I really can't imagine a world without the web now. It's become such an integral part of my existence. Much more than any other means of communication and certainly more than TV et al. Where would us Wolfers be without it, eh?!

Time Berners-Lee is a credit to humanity and gives me hope for the future of mankind - and I sincerely mean that.

@Per-Scan wrote:I really can't imagine a world without the web now. It's become such an integral part of my existence. Much more than any other means of communication and certainly more than TV et al. Where would us Wolfers be without it, eh?!

Yes, before the web etc I remember using bulletin boards where you just got a few downloads. A lot of the boards were long distance and cost a lot to access. If you were lucky, the download would work.

Although some of the early shareware mods were on the boards, it was only once the web was widely used that we Wolfers started getting a lot of mods.

I couldn't even get on the BBS scene as my dad didn't understand the tech so we weren't allowed. Then when I left home I was too poor to even have a phone line. I used to be so jealous of all those 'rich' people who could afford to download game after game. I had to resort to paying for pirated Amiga games as it was the only way I could get anything interesting to play - don't tell the police though!

It's amazing to think how much it's all come on in the past 20 years and not just the web. If someone had given me my now current netbook (crappy by contemporary standards) 20 years ago I would have sworn it was something from a science fiction show! I mean, a machine with a wafer thin screen with a resolution of 1024x600 that can connect to the internet wirelessly anywhere in the world so that I can talk to people across the globe about things I thought only I cared about with memory and storage measured in gigabytes. Wow, just wow.

PS: I still love my VIC-20 though! You gotta play VicWolf (W3D clone on the VIC) somehow!!

There were British quasi-computers in 1939 or the 1940s that cracked the German Enigma Code. Maybe I shouldn't call them quasi-computers, but they were nothing like today's computers.

The first computers were the size of rooms and could literally stop because of a bug. Supposedly Ada Lovelace found a millipede or something in a computer, taped it to an index card to a friend with "I've found a bug in the computer." Somebody else said it wasn't her, but it was somebody else.

20 years ago this weekend!? 20 years ago this weekend I rented an NES game because it was near my 11th birthday. We watched on American television as there were tanks in Russia and a coup. Then the following December, it became The Commonwealth of Independent States.

Some American brats on the internet troll in 133tsp33k or "Elite Speak." I always thought it was dweeby and it mangled the English language. They would type "PWNED" instead of "OWNED" or "BUSTED." I thought that The Information Superhighway was a dweeby term for the internet because nobody would ever stick to the same logic and call a phone or fax machine the "Telephone and Telegraph Superhighway."

Speaking of starting the internet, American politician Al Gore Jr. has delusions of grandeur and had been called the biggest idiot in the White House. He became a politician after being kicked out of divinity school. He said that he and his wife Tipper were the inspiration for Love Story. That's not true. Tipper is alive and the woman from Love Story died. Al Gore Jr. didn't have a clue when he said that he fathered the Internet. Actually, I had heard that Arpanet or CERN was founded 8 years before Gore Jr. was even a Senator. The movie "An Inconvenient Truth" can't be shown in schools in Britain without a disclaimer that it's propaganda. Gore Jr. didn't write his own speeches and in one of them, he said that his favorite Biblical quote is John 3:16. Then he acted like he had no idea what it was. He's the goofball that thinks that he fathered the internet.

The black and white Game Boys from 1989 have about the same computing power as the 1969 Moon Lander. I've heard that the 1998/1999 Furby toy had about 6 times the computing power of the Eagle Moon Lander. NASA's computers lost the telemetry data of the Moon landing!

I remember when you could fit several computer games into a 1.44 megabyte floppy disk. Now I have Unreal Anthology and it's something like 9 gigabytes of games on the hard drive. I now have a 1.5 terabyte portable hard drive. Our first PC had about 0.5 gigabytes, I think. Our black and white Macintosh or Macintosh Plus had a 10 megabyte portable hard drive.

In college, my Dad worked with a calculator the size of today's microwave ovens. It could only do plus, minus, multiply, divide, and square root. Dad and I bought an old mechanical calculator with gears, played with it, did something wrong once, and it got stuck. I've heard that Exabyte tapes were literally tapes! I never had an Adam nor ZX Spectrum game console, but I had heard that those games were literally tapes! 8-track music tapes in The United States were literally tapes! I think that our nearest antique store maybe threw out all the 8-track tapes because nobody will buy them anymore. But it was only a figure of speech when we said Nintendo or Sega tapes because they were cartridges. I used 100 MB Zip Disks before we had a CD burner.

In about 2001 in one of my computer graphics classes or in the computer graphics club, we had a guest speaker again. He said that he brought a magazine article about the internet to Microsoft in 1990. Microsoft said something like, "Oh, that's the internet. Don't worry about it. It won't go anywhere."

@Per-Scan wrote:PS: I still love my VIC-20 though! You gotta play VicWolf (W3D clone on the VIC) somehow!!

A comedian on the radio said that he majored in Asian Studies in College. It was all Asians. It didn't work out and he changed his major to Computer Science. It was all Asians.

I've heard that Germans and Asians have higher test scores because their languages might be more logical. I wouldn't know since I don't know these languages. Or maybe it's their work ethic. Or maybe Germans had an extra year of public school. Or maybe American society has the most distractions.

In one computer class, we had to chose the 3 worst web sites that we have ever seen and explain why. Here are 3 that are safe for work:

Dihydrogen monoxide: Dihydrogen monoxide has been found in pregnant women, babies, urine of babies, on elementary school playgrounds, in plastic bottles, in paper cups, and all industrial companies use it. Side effects of too much can include frequent urination, sweating, or lungs filling up with it causing drowning. Withdrawal causes death. The web site shows how to tell if you've been exposed to it and how you should react. Do you want to sign a petition to ban Dihydrogen monoxide or H2O? Let me put it this way - How do you feel about water?

Timecube.com: The founder of this web site rants that the Earth is a cube and that there's a conspiracy to make people think that the Earth is round. He says that he's a diagnosed Schizophrenic, and complains about what his psychiatrist tells him to do and how people treat him. Something about him tells me he's a virgin and should stay that way to keep from passing the crazy genes on to future generations. CERN would be ashamed of this web site. He reminds me of The Jerry Springer Show for some reason.

The Flat Earth Society: The Flat Earth Society said that the Earth is flat and that The Anglo-Saxon Society built bases on The Moon and Mars. Something tells me that these white people should be shot into space.

It's not really Wolfenstein as we know it but it is a 3D engine running in real time with a pretty good frame rate. The guy behind it is also working on a version of Doom!

As for me 20 years ago; I was becoming a daddy to a bouncing baby boy! I also played my first gig in a local pub which was terrible. Really bad cover songs played really badly to an audience who couldn't care less - great days! I went to my first Iron Maiden concert. And I went to London for the first time too.